Alin Mureşan
The Institute for the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism in Romania
alin.muresan@yahoo.com
Expressing the Inexpressible
Abstract: This article provides a survey of the main memoirs volumes about the Piteşti ”experiment” and aims to offer a description, in terms of both style and emotion, of how the victims relate to their past tortures. For each volume, several qualities and drawbacks are indicated through the lens of a reader who wishes to find more precise information about what is meant by the so-called ”re-education through torture.”
Keywords: Romania; Communism; the Piteşti prison; memoirs; victims; torture; guilt.
Many of the victims of the inhuman “Piteşti experiment” believe that perhaps too much has been written about the abominable tortures carried out in the above-mentioned prison. Their reactions are understandable, because those who suppress their traumas do not find any pleasure in remembering or reliving all the events that they have tried to forget. However, it is obvious that the memoirs of those former prisoners, who believed these confessions to be important, are not satisfactory for a researcher who wants not only to retrieve the whole truth, but also to understand the administrative mechanisms that led to the “experiment”. Given the overwhelming number of studies relevant to this issue, I have selected those works that are written by authors who experienced the Piteşti ‘experiment’ directly and that stand out through their stylistic achievement and perspective. Since I cannot possibly refer to all the books related to this case, I shall choose some representative volumes which are remarkable from a stylistic point of view, as well as through their particular approach to the Piteşti phenomenon.
In Jertfa. (Transfigurări)[1] (Sacrifice. Transfigurations), the author resorts to an alter ego in Pep Leonte’s person in order to avoid any direct references to his own person; thus, he prefers to write in the third person singular. A great particularity of this book, which makes it unique within the corpus of memoirs related to Piteşti, is its parsimony as concerns the immediate, physical details of the prison. The book is centred on the feelings and spiritual transformations of Pep Leonte (and many other inmates around him) and it teems with philosophical considerations. The language of the book is adapted to the academic message par excellence that the author wants to give, albeit he makes the reading easy through his alert narrative style. Although the author’s preference for suggestive comparisons is obvious, he does not make overabundant use of tropes.
Great artistry is also evidenced by the work of Mihai Buracu. He was a Romanian language teacher, and as such he is one of the few victims to whom the formal aspects of his writing are as important as his confession. Stylistic self-awareness is very powerful and his narrative is extremely ornate; the introductory chapter is exceptional in that here the author’s self-consciousness takes the form of an interlaid reiteration of the formula ”I am the scribe”. The entire text redeems the turmoil and the inner struggle of the author, unsatisfied with his attempt to explain to himself the ordeal that he and his fellow inmates go through: “At Piteşti, while they could not put us on the stake and burn us as they pleased, they took great pleasure in burning us on the inside”.
The writing occasions a return to the years of torture, and the story is for its larger part narrated in the present tense. Showing that he is taking his role as a scribe seriously, Buracu feels the need to frame his Piteşti experience within the events before the arrest and after his release. He also notices that the bestiality, the manipulation and the fraternal feud from Piteşti were revived four decades later during the miners’ invasion of Bucharest in a so-called democratic regime, which was nevertheless ruled by the same old organizational structures. Unfortunately, when it came out, the book faced a quasi universal problem: due to lack of funding, it was published in very few copies, so today it is a rarity. The book would have probably had a different fate if it had had a larger visibility and had benefited from more professional editing.
Traian Popescu[2] is another ex-convict who captures the theme of suffering in his writing. Although he lacks stylistic abilities and is fond of exactness and simplification (due to his professional training), his story is original, because the torturing he endured turned him into a music writer in jail, despite his lack of any previous knowledge about music. In Experimentul Piteşti. Mucenicie si satanizare (The Piteşti Experiment: Expiation and Demonisation), Popescu is one of the first to assert what happened in the Romanian communist prisons. The author writes less about the cruel facts or the daily misery endured in prison and more about the personal involvement of some more or less guilty victims (a confusion intentionally induced by the Securitate), as well as about the architects that staged the events. His considerations regarding the culprits are rather intuitive, due to the fact that he has not had the opportunity to study the documents of re-education trials. Nevertheless, the situation changes when Popescu evaluates the effects and the purposes of the experiment, as he manages to provide some interesting valid assumptions. For instance, he claims that the endless tortures from Piteşti led to two major reactions from the victims: first, there were the martyrs, those ennobled by their suffering; secondly, the weak characters, those who gave up and ended up as demonic instruments. In between these two antagonistic attitudes comes an entire spectrum of possible nuances. The book’s structure is not that of a memoir, not in the classical sense, that is, but rather that of a collection of analyses whereby the author gives a comprehensive examination of “the experiment”, as well as of his own artistic creation.
One of the facts that characterize Gheorghe Bâgu’s book is confessed by the author in the beginning: his memories were written in the seventies, that being the reason behind some of the excerpts. The tone of the book is full of pathos, as the author tries to lyrically describe the feeling of horror about his impending future arrest. The text oscillates between a distant tone and an emotional description of the author’s traumas, the language being neither too fastidious, nor overtly concerned for the artistic style.
His suffering is visible in his accurate description of the tough prison situation: the misery, the hunger, the rats, the fear. Because of the time in which he writes, Bâgu describes with accuracy the way in which he tells his roommates about celebrating Christmas and the New Year in Moldavia; this digression in fact exempts him from making political considerations (almost absent from the book, as if he was constructing a justification for himself, should the secret service “Securitate” find the manuscript). There are other digressions, for example whole pages in which he describes life in the post-war times or the reasons for which he was arrested.
Another illustration can be found in Eugen Măgirescu’s booklet Moara dracilor[3] (The Devils’ Mill). As the volume was written in 1987, probably under difficult conditions and on the run, it is very concise (26 pages in total) and it deals exclusively with the author’s personal ”self-unmasking”, with the exception of a few general considerations on the way in which Piteşti was intercepted. Although of intellectual education and with a clean writing, Măgirescu uses an almost expeditious style for his published journal: the phrases are short, almost free of tropes, the description would be cold were it not for the suffering it conveys.
Another distinct element is the stance adopted by the author towards his own involvement in torture. Măgirescu was one of the young people who were most frequently used in applying torture, because he was one of the students from Iasi who where known for their high study skills, as well as their nationalistic activities (for which he was sentenced before the communists came to power). Physically destroyed, he cracked up and joined the teams of the aggressors, which he does not avoid admitting; however, he devotes a much larger number of pages to describing the tortures endured by himself compared to the ones in which he talks about his destiny after his fall. That comes, of course, from a complex of guilt towards the ones he physically abused, but also from his discontent with the mistaken comprehension of the responsibilities of those involved in acts of torture. That being said, although he claims that his writings are for the enrichment of testimonial collections, in reality the content of his memories is very poor in data and facts.
A testimonial at least as important from the point of view of the author’s involvement is the one by Octavian Voinea. He was tortured, became an informant, sided with the aggressors, was investigated, and sentenced in the „Turcanu et alia” trial; he was a witness for prosecution in the second re-education and, again, a victim of the concentration regime. Unfortunately, all those ups and downs left their mark on the author, his speech being greatly affected by the multiple traumas he suffered. Furthermore, many facts presented are arguable, and some estimations concerning other characters are highly subjective or lack sufficient knowledge. For these reasons, the book partially fails in its purpose of being a rich source of first-class information, although many chapters are relevant to what the communist detention meant. Voinea insists on the humiliations endured by the Piteşti experiment’s victims, in order to show the inhumanity of those who imagined it. He tells the story of Papken Keropian, an Armenian priest who confessed to having been destroyed both physically and mentally (he was forced to make sacraments with excrements, to claim that he had abused his own daughter, etc).
A hallmark in the series of books describing the Piteşti tortures and the people involved in them is that of Dumitru Gh. Bordeianu, Mărturisiri din mlastina disperării, (Confessions from the Pool of Despair), due to both the subtlety with which the author conveys a lot of factual details and the destiny which threw the author in the middle of one of the chambers in which the suffering had almost no limits, in terms of both intensity and duration. Bordeianu deems the “Piteşti experiment” to have been a mystic phenomenon, for believers in God and, possibly, for atheist advocates alike. His position explains the enthusiastic tone of narration and also the reductionist approach, because (with the exception of one aggressor) he refers strictly to what his legionnaire colleagues endured. His choice can lead to the conclusion that the only victims of the tortures were members of the Legionnaire Movement, but in the above-mentioned prison all anticommunist party members and movements had to suffer, even the so-called “apoliticals”. The author justifies their omission from the story in that it would not seem fair to judge them in one way or another.
The value of the book lies in the wealth of details and episodes described from memory, an invaluable record for those interested in reconstituting the events of those years. Bordeianu describes both the wretched conditions in the prisons and the torture processes based on the first-hand experience and testimonials of people with whom he came into contact in prison. The book is devoid of stylistic intentions and does not aim to impress through its form, but through the information transmitted, a goal which is clearly achieved.
Mihai Timaru has a similar testimony, though with less feeling and without the mystical element that pervades Bordeianu’s book. He is more sober and more dignified in his suffering, but his volume is especially important because of his victim role during the “re-education”. Having been tortured for a long time during the maximum intensity period at Gherla, Timaru offers a valid testimonial about what he heard and what actually happened in that prison.
Aurel Vişovan’s book is singular among the memories written about the Piteşti prison, because it was written by another former political prisoner (a prison mate of the author), Gheorghe Andreica. The latter’s influence can be noticed in the entire structure of the volume, so it is hard to arrive at definitive conclusions regarding Vişovan’s style. Basically, everything about the feelings and thoughts transmitted by the text (numerous interruptions for reflections on the narrative yarn, an abundance of suspension points, quotations or bold metaphors, highlighting certain messages through italics or bolds) is owed to Andreica. If the formal touch, however, is due to Andreica, the content comprises Vişovan’s thoughts and reflections. The tone of the book shows the acceptance at an intellectual level (albeit not the emotional one) of the lived experience of suffering. Referring to the religious belief for which he suffered (at least partially) in prison, the author concedes to having lacked meekness, that humble Christian sentiment, and for that he believes he was punished by divinity. In fact, the book has a note of mysticism, Vişovan stressing on occasion that what happened at Piteşti exceeds the power of human understanding, making it difficult to conceive how not only the victim lived a drama when he was tortured by the aggressor, but that that was shared by the aggressor himself, in many cases a former pal, a colleague of the victim. An element of originality is the text that opens the book, a poem about Piteşti composed by Vişovan.
The sobriety of Neculai Popa’s style, another memorialist of the Gulag, is dictated by his stated goal: the duty to confess, the duty towards his partners and their suffering, to the deceased victims. From here, but also from the concerns of the author to collect data on the victims of the communist regime in Neamţ County, comes his habit of providing as much information about each character encountered on his route from prison to prison. More than as a victim, Popa assumes the role of a scribe with obvious literary talent. His phrases are clear and fluent. If the tone manages to be relatively neutral, when it comes to the confinement experience and the tortures, the suffering can no longer be hidden. Still the book does not become tiring by over exposing the tortures. The structure of the memoirs genre enables the author to cover all detention episodes, some more easily bearable than others, so that even the funny moments from prison can be found here.
There are a series of books written by former victims which treat the horrific tortures from Piteşti more than lapidarily on probably different grounds: either they attempt to repress painful memories, or they have not been helped enough by their memory to describe in detail the scenes lived five decades ago, or they only partially experienced the most horrific tortures. Such are the volumes written by Corneliu Cornea[4], Sabin Ivan[5] and Nicolae Călinescu[6].
The vast majority of those who have written their memories about Piteşti have achieved their purpose and have been transformed into veritable chroniclers (Neculai Popa, Dumitru Gheorghe Bordeianu, Mihai Timaru). Others have tried to extricate themselves from the grasp of the tortures, without edulcorating the realities of the ”experiment”, as a mode of uncovering the real guilt (Traian Popescu, Dan Lucinescu). Finally, the attitudes toward their disposal are noteworthy, since they are either barely mentioned or overlooked in silence (Octavian Voinea, Gheorghe Bâgu). This is explicable if we think of the public tendency to stigmatize the victims, whether they were guilty or not, instead of the masterminds behind the scene. Truly remarkable, though, is that the immense suffering of Piteşti could be highlighted in art by some of the victims.
Notes
[2] Traian Popescu, Experimentul Piteşti. Mucenicie şi satanizare. Terorismul din închisorile Piteşti, Gherla, Canal, Tg. Ocna. Atacul brutalităţii asupra conştiinţei, cuvânt înainte de Răzvan Codrescu, ediţia a III-a, revăzută şi adăugită, Bucureşti, Editura Scara, 2007.
[3] Eugen Măgirescu, Moara dracilor. Amintiri din închisoarea de la Piteşti, text stabilit de Remus Radina, Fronde, Alba Iulia – Paris, 1994.
[4] Corneliu Ioan Cornea, Viaţa aşa cum a fost. Însemnări, ediţia a II-a, revăzută şi adăugită, Arad, Editura Gutenberg, 2003.